Whitney Biennial 2017

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780300 223095

Printed in the United States

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2017

ISBN 978-0-300-22309-5

Zarouhie Abdalian Basma Alsharif Jo Baer Eric Baudelaire Robert Beavers Larry Bell Matt Browning Susan Cianciolo Mary Helena Clark John Divola Celeste Dupuy-Spencer Rafa Esparza Kevin Jerome Everson GCC Oto Gillen Samara Golden Casey Gollan and Victoria Sobel Irena Haiduk Lyle Ashton Harris Tommy Hartung Porpentine Charity Heartscape Sky Hopinka Shara Hughes Aaron Flint Jamison KAYA Jon Kessler James N. Kienitz Wilkins Ajay Kurian Deana Lawson An-My Lê Leigh Ledare Dani Leventhal Tala Madani Park McArthur Harold Mendez Carrie Moyer Ulrike Müller Julien Nguyen Tuan Andrew Nguyen Raúl de Nieves Aliza Nisenbaum Occupy Museums Pope.L aka William Pope.L Postcommodity Puppies Puppies Asad Raza Jessi Reaves John Riepenhoff Chemi Rosado-Seijo Cameron Rowland Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Dana Schutz Cauleen Smith Frances Stark Maya Stovall Henry Taylor Leslie Thornton and James Richards Torey Thornton Kaari Upson Kamasi Washington Leilah Weinraub Jordan Wolfson Anicka Yi

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2017 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

FOREWORD ADAM D. WEINBERG

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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SCOTT ROTHKOPF Sincerely Yours: A Conversation with Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks

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MIA LOCKS Being with Other People

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CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW You Better Work (All Together Now)

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GEAN MORENO The Other Side of the Sun

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NEGAR AZIMI Hair; Or, Notes on a Fine Metaphor for These Times

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AILY NASH A Conversation with Basma Alsharif, Kevin Jerome Everson, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins

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EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

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CONTRIBUTORS

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ARTIST ENTRIES

FOREWORD

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Artists are often prognosticators. They are sensitive to the signals—and not afraid to face the realities—of the present-day culture that they refine, transform, fortify, and retransmit. Accordingly, given the anxious and deeply unsettled nature of social and political affairs in the United States leading up to the most recent presidential election, the 2017 Whitney Biennial not only reflects but foreshadows the uncertain, bitter, and divided state of the nation. For artists pay attention, worry, contemplate, speculate, advance, provoke, contest, and protest. They are strident; they offer dissenting and often surprising propositions, alternative points of view, and idealistic dreams—all of which are much needed at this moment.

I am writing this foreword just a few weeks after the 2016 election. Curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, aided by an excellent group of advisors in the field, have selected the artists and collectives—sixty-three in all—for the Biennial.

The works have largely been chosen and proposals for commissioned projects are under way. The list of artists has been released and the press is busy parsing the significance of both the choices and the mix of artists. Dealers whose artists will be in the show are touting the Museum’s wisdom, while other interested parties are no doubt disappointed by who has not been included. It has been many years since the Whitney believed in the notion of, or attempted to produce, a comprehensive exhibition representing contemporary American art. Even decades ago, that was an impossible task. Each Biennial is therefore but a snapshot, a barometer—one measurement of many—of the times as experienced through art.

The process of organizing a Biennial is largely intuitive, albeit based on extensive experience and study. The curators are detectives in search of multiple, leading suspects as much as singular perpetrators. They look carefully, listen attentively, and travel extensively in the hopes of

discerning the zeitgeist—understanding, of course, that such an assessment is impressionistic, to some degree subjective, and results in a gathering of artist visions as dissimilar from one another in appearance as they are in intent.

From the beginning, though, the Whitney Museum of American Art has been awash in the social and artistic currents of its day, particularly through its Biennials and concurrent acquisitions. While founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney played a critical role in supporting the artistically and politically radical practitioners of realism—among them John Sloan, Robert Henri, and George Bellows, who portrayed the dismaying social conditions of immigrant life in American cities—she also recognized the importance of presenting advanced strains of utopian, modernist art. Thus, in keeping with this democratic spirit, in the first Biennial (1932) we find works not only by the aforementioned realists but also by Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley, whose art differed considerably from Mrs. Whitney’s own sculpture and personal taste. This notion of pushing beyond what is comfortable, of presenting diverse approaches to artmaking, and above all of understanding that art can never be severed from the world at large, has always been in the Whitney’s DNA. For example, realizing that art had become an event in the environment, the 1970 Sculpture Annual presented site-specific works outside the Museum, including Keith Sonnier’s Untitled sound work on the roof of his studio in SoHo. Richard Serra’s To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted in the Bronx and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, were also part of the exhibition. The 1993 Biennial pointed beyond the social confines of the Museum, from Pat Ward Williams’s photomural of five black men with the spray-painted statement “What you lookn at” scrawled over it visible in the Whitney’s windows from the street, to Daniel J. Martinez’s

FOREWORD

study for Museum Tags, which declared on visitors’ entrance badges, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” The 2000 Biennial included Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s Infinito Botanica, a table placed in front of the Whitney on Madison Avenue where the artist sold Tex-Mex objets d’art. The 2002 Biennial featured works in and around Central Park, such as Keith Edmier’s Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944, bronze figures that memorialized the World War II service of his grandfathers.

And the 2008 Biennial presented performances

by Coco Fusco and Matt Mullican, among others, at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue.

These Biennial works and many, many others, especially over the last decades, had an explicit sociopolitical dimension that connected the Museum to the world. Art is more than politics, but politics informs art. As our mission statement declares, “We foster the work of living artists at critical moments in their careers.” So too do we encourage, reinforce, and defend artists’ voices at critical moments in history.

But artists also feel vulnerable psychically and financially. As Chris Lew recounts herein, “We want to acknowledge artists as people, as humans—to not just treat an artist as an abstraction, saying, ‘We want your work, but we’re not going to deal with you as a person.’” Indeed, this was Mrs. Whitney’s philosophy even before the inception of the Museum in 1931. She believed in providing for artists’ human needs (housing, medical, social, and educational) and artistic needs as much as amassing a collection. “It is not as a repository of what American artists have done in the past that the museum expects to find its greatest usefulness,” she wrote, believing that the Whitney should participate in the present by actively supporting artists in their endeavors to make history as well as reflect it.

As the Whitney’s next chapter begins in our downtown home, we recommit ourselves to following the lead of artists, to trusting in their

visions, which, at this moment, are greatly affected by the sociopolitical realm. Mia Locks notes in the curatorial interview that follows, “Every time we entered a studio, issues of inequality or racism or violence were being brought up in one way or another without our prompting.” This is evident in Frances Stark’s series of Censorship Now paintings, Jordan Wolfson’s address of brutality in our culture, Aliza Nisenbaum’s reflections on the immigrant experience, Lyle Ashton Harris’s personal consideration of race and gay identity, and Postcommodity’s focus on more nuanced understandings of community beyond national borders, among many other urgent projects.

While the new Whitney building wonderfully showcases art, it has never constituted our purpose or mission. It is a vehicle, not a temple or an end in itself. It is an aspirational space for artists to do their work not ours, a space for connecting to and with the world. Designed with transparency as part of its ethos, the building can be seen from and looks out 360 degrees.

Consequently, artists in the 2017 Biennial are using it and what it offers to create their work, work that is unruly and sometimes subversive, such as Rafa Esparza’s room-size installation made of adobe bricks that literally creates space in the lobby gallery for the work of other artists invited by Esparza; Park McArthur’s no-information signage pieces, one of which greets visitors above the admissions desk; Ajay Kurian’s exciting but troubling work, in the central staircase, that comments on the notion of upward mobility; Larry Bell’s site-specific commission for the fifthfloor outdoor gallery, itself a metaphor for interior/exterior space; Zarouhie Abdalian’s sound work that addresses visitors from the east-facing terraces on the sixth and seventh floors, uttering a list of tools that evokes the legacies of manual labor; Raúl de Nieves’s vibrant stained-glass installation along the fifth-floor windows on the building’s east side, which casts a colorful glow

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visible both inside and out; and Samara Golden’s disorienting and disquieting mirrored built environment that engages the Hudson River.

Moreover, the building itself encourages a reciprocal relationship with the exterior world, from the billboard across the street from the Whitney that will be utilized by Puppies Puppies to Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s work in which a fifth-floor gallery will serve as a high school classroom for Lower Manhattan Arts Academy while the school classroom will become a gallery.

This has not been an easy time in American history to assess, no less comprehend and present, a Biennial. In the maelstrom of the moment, however, the curators, together with the excellent guidance and insights of the Whitney’s deputy director for programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, Scott Rothkopf, have given their all to the intractable situation at hand. With sensitivity, honesty, deep probing, and clarity of purpose they have been unafraid to take a stand and commit to a selection of voices that they believe are among the most salient and emblematic at this time. They have demonstrated how, as described in this volume, “an exhibition is a social space for aesthetic experience as well as an aesthetic space for social experience.” For all of this, I wish to express my profound thanks and greatest admiration to exhibition curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks. They would also be the first to acknowledge Biennial advisors Negar Azimi, Gean Moreno, Aily Nash, and Wendy Yao for brainstorming, critiquing, and providing reality checks during marathon retreats and informal consultations; I extend my gratitude as well for their expertise.

The Museum could never realize ambitious undertakings such as the Whitney Biennial without many institutional and individual donors. I am most grateful to Tiffany & Co. for recognizing the significance of the Biennial and for its steadfast commitment to the presentation

of the exhibition. J.P. Morgan Private Bank and Sotheby’s both provided crucial support of the exhibition. My great thanks are also due to the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston and the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. I acknowledge the important support provided by the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation. My appreciation also goes to 2017 Biennial Committee Co-Chairs Leslie Bluhm, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Bob Gersh, and Miyoung Lee; Biennial Committee members Diane and Adam E. Max, Teresa Tsai, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg, Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo, and Jackson Tang; as well as the Henry Peterson Foundation and anonymous donors. I gratefully recognize the Austrian Federal Chancellery and Phileas — A Fund for Contemporary Art as well as the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States for their support. Funding from special Biennial endowments created by Melva Bucksbaum, Emily Fisher Landau, Leonard A. Lauder, and Fern and Lenard Tessler was essential, as was additional endowment support from the Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, and the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation. I am also appreciative of Rosina Lee Yue and Bert A. Lies, Jr., whose endowment funded the curators’ travel and research.

This is an exhibition that the curators acknowledge has “very dark overtones,” but it also “shows that artists can envision a future that is different.”

Indeed, the artists included are creating challenging art for challenging times—a hallmark of the Whitney Biennial.

—ADAM D. WEINBERG ALICE PRATT BROWN DIRECTOR

SCOTT ROTHKOPF Sincerely Yours: A Conversation with Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks

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MIA LOCKS Being with Other People

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CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW You Better Work (All Together Now)

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GEAN MORENO The Other Side of the Sun

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NEGAR AZIMI Hair; Or, Notes on a Fine Metaphor for These Times

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AILY NASH A Conversation with Basma Alsharif, Kevin Jerome Everson, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins

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SINCERELY YOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW AND MIA LOCKS Rothkopf, Scott

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Scott Rothkopf: Let’s start by talking about your process and the two of you. In 2015, as I began my job as chief curator at the Whitney, I thought a lot about what the first Biennial in our new building might represent. The show is often considered the Whitney’s “flagship” exhibition. Yet the Biennial had actually become a bit disconnected from the rest of our program, because we weren’t consistently showing emerging artists throughout the years in between. Downtown, we’ve recommitted ourselves to premiering younger talents and doing smaller group shows of new tendencies. So, I felt like this Biennial had to be even more engaged with emerging artists than recent installments had been—more in the trenches and far-reaching.

Given Chris’s key role in reenergizing our contemporary profile, it felt natural to task him with this brief. But apart from that, Chris, you were given carte blanche to fly solo or assemble a team.

Christopher Y. Lew: It’s been an amazing opportunity to fold more emerging artists into our program. When approaching something as big as organizing the Biennial, I realized it calls for research conducted in conversation with others.

I wanted a co-curator with whom I could be in real dialogue, and who would test my ideas about making the show. I don’t think you can develop that level of trust and rapport overnight. Thinking about all this led me directly to Mia—for her rigor, and because we have an existing friendship. I knew it would be a fun process.

And when we differed, we challenged each other’s tastes and ideas in a productive way. A Whitney Biennial should get beyond the personal tastes or affinities of a particular curator. It’s different than a thematic group show or a show that might take years and years to research, so we were lucky that we could just kind of jump right into it without any of the— Rothkopf: Dating before marriage?

Locks: We just hit the road.

Lew: We knew our respective strengths balanced each other’s weaknesses. Having grown up in New York, and having worked in the city for over a decade, I have a sense of what’s going on here. Mia had spent eight years in Los Angeles before moving east, and that also helped to jump-start our process.

And, of course, we also aimed to cover as much ground as we could between those two art hubs.

Rothkopf: While it’s pretty common for the Biennial to have co-curators, what differed this time is that you chose to convene a group of advisors with whom you collaborated closely. You credit them as contributors to the development of the exhibition.

Lew: It’s written into the contract—joined at the hip. [laughter]

Locks: Yes, they are also contributors to the catalogue. Their voices have been key. It’s wonderful to get lost in your own thoughts, to fall into a hole and find all this other stuff—that’s a great part of the process—but just like any writer needs a good editor, all processes like these need a kind of sounding board, peers with whom you can have a casual but committed conversation, where people don’t just feel like, “Okay, we’re having a drink, it’s nice to see you.” We wanted the advisors to be invested in this process and in an ongoing dialogue over the arc of the show.

Locks: Though we’d never collaborated before, we were comfortable disagreeing with one another.

Lew: To begin with, we had you, Scott, to advise us. You brought a broader institutional outlook,

Rothkopf: Has it turned out that way?

Mia Locks: Yes. But it’s been intense, too. We’ve spent more time together over the past year and a half than we have with anyone else.

SINCERELY YOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW AND MIA LOCKS Rothkopf, Scott

which—compounded by your regular reminders of trends that viciously return—gave the process real perspective when we were in the thick of it. And you’ve spurred everyone on by playing devil’s advocate. [laughter]

She represents a new generation of film-andvideo curators who are thinking hard about what moving images mean in the twenty-first century.

Scott, you felt it was important to have a strong film component.

Locks: Yes, I’ve appreciated your persistent willingness, Scott, to challenge our thinking by asking difficult questions.

Rothkopf: Well, in part because our new building has a proper theater as opposed to just a gallery dedicated to film and video like we had uptown.

It seemed crucial to prioritize that aspect of the Biennial, which had become less present in some of the recent installments.

Lew: We also invited Gean Moreno to be an advisor. He is curator of programs at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] in Miami. He has his own artistic practice, and is kind of a human encyclopedia—particularly well versed in theory and things touching on the political sphere.

Locks: And we have Wendy Yao, who is in L.A. She is maybe best known as the founder of the store Ooga Booga and, more recently, an exhibition space called 356 Mission that she runs with the painter Laura Owens—it’s one of the most exciting things that’s happened in L.A. in recent years. Wendy moves beyond thinking institutionally about art. Actually, she came out of a punk scene. She was a musician herself.

Lew: Wendy has long-standing relationships with lots of musicians, chefs, and clothing designers.

Locks: And then there’s Negar Azimi, a writer and a senior editor at Bidoun. She’s on the board of directors at Artists Space here in New York, where she’s based. On top of her broad knowledge of art, Negar has studied politics and anthropology, and thinks expansively about the cultures of the Middle East. That frame of thinking expanded into our conversations in a really meaningful way.

Lew: Aily Nash, who has organized programs at Basilica Hudson in upstate New York and for the New York Film Festival’s Projections program, is an advisor and co-curator of the film program.

Locks: With the advisors, we held retreats, and in advance we’d send out a list of topics and artists currently on our minds—usually very stream of consciousness—as conversation starters.

Lew: The retreats were useful in that they prompted us to update our thinking. They helped us recognize when we were heading off course.

If we had said something at one meeting, months later we’d convene and the group would remind us, “Well, where did this go?” They created a foundation, whereas if we were just having drinks with individuals each time afresh, we wouldn’t have been able to build ideas in the same way.

Locks: It was also helpful for Chris and me to have conversations with individual advisors, to pose specific questions.

Lew: And it was cool that they would join us for studio visits whenever possible.

Rothkopf: Those ongoing exchanges gave a kind of narrative texture to the conversation. But in terms of tracking down new artists, how did you start, and where did you go? And how did you know to head toward what you didn’t already know?

Lew: We reached out to curators, writers, and artists on the ground all over. Then we followed up with studio visits.

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Locks: Let’s see . . . We went to Boston and Providence really early on. Also to Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Lew: We went to Puerto Rico.

Locks: Yes, that was an early trip as well.

Lew: I remember San Juan vividly, being in a restaurant with artists and curators mostly involved with the artist-run nonprofit Beta-Local and a new space that has opened in the Hato Rey neighborhood, Embajada. They were speaking about the urgencies of Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy issues. Some of them had snuck into this conference where investors could purchase pieces of the island’s public assets—ports and things. There was a real urgency in San Juan that spoke to things going on across the country.

Locks: Yes, the debt crisis in Puerto Rico brought up a lot of national issues in terms of infrastructure and privatization. Going to so many cities as part of our research was about getting a sense of the cultural landscape. Most of our time was spent in studios, sure, but we also looked at exhibitions, project spaces, artist-run spaces—we were getting a sense of creative communities outside of what we already knew or had been privy to. Artists, like all cultural producers, are basically working from where they are, right?

They’re responding to the world around them, often in an immediate sense. I think particularly at this time in this country—not to get into politics right off the bat . . .

Rothkopf: Go for it. You did get into politics right off the bat, as I recall.

Locks: Okay, well, we’re in a moment when things feel beyond us, or so hugely problematic that one response is to focus on locality, a sense of responsibility to the people around you, to your community.

We saw this again and again, in cities big and small.

Rothkopf: I’m struck by how much the issue of the local comes up in the show, especially given that so many discussions in the art world lately have been about global or international currents.

And in your catalogue essays, you’re not talking about the refugee crisis or Brexit, or even something as far-reaching as climate change, but about the American presidential election, Black Lives Matter, mass shootings, and individual debt. It’s not that these issues don’t exist or have analogues in other cultures, but you seem to address them within the specific framework of the United States. It does feel to me like a very American show, and not just because these are artists who are typically living and working in the United States but because the topics and ways of working seem so specific.

Locks: When we first sat down with our advisors, we circulated Dana Miller’s essay from the Whitney’s recently published collection handbook, about the Museum’s institutional history, as a kind of prompt to address that question of “Americanness.” As much as the Biennial is oriented toward the art of the moment, and even as it has a kind of predictive framework, it’s also a show with a deep history. It is a show that has taken place in some form since 1932, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That is significant! In the past it has raised the question of who is an American artist—who qualifies and who doesn’t. In this Biennial, something about American culture feels very much at stake. Traveling around the country in this election year has been a cultural experience in and of itself.

Rothkopf: Well, it’s worth mentioning that this is the first Biennial organized during the run-up to a presidential election since the 1997 edition.

Locks: And this election will inevitably be remembered as a historically polarizing one.

The issues being addressed, what’s in the air right now . . . Every time we entered a studio,

SINCERELY YOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW AND MIA LOCKS Rothkopf, Scott

issues of inequality or racism or violence were being brought up in one way or another without our prompting.

Rothkopf: Mia, you use the word “unease” in your catalogue essay. Does the show have a rather bleak emotional tenor?

Locks: I think it’s dark at times, but that’s the moment we’re in. The Biennial we’ve put together I don’t think either Chris or I saw in advance. We surprised ourselves in a lot of ways. A process like this is so fast-moving, and the rise of Donald Trump literally coincided with our project. It became this kind of nightmare-slash-train-wreck that we were watching happen. What’s most terrifying is what Trump has stirred up, what his rhetoric and behavior represent, which is a dark part of American culture and society that’s always been there and now has a soapbox to stand on.

And artists talked to us about what these current conditions do to one’s ability to make work, how they weigh on us, and what we need to . . . not adjudicate . . . but what’s the antidote to hate speech and narcissistic misogyny and blatant racism? Artists are asking very pointed questions about how to engage, how to model ways of thinking about ourselves as human beings.

Lew: The show may have very dark overtones, but there’s another side to it that shows that artists can envision a future that is different. They are attempting to overcome the challenges we’re facing today, and to return agency to the individual. I think of the painter Shara Hughes, who is making imagined landscapes that take on a very different affect in this moment than they might in another. The Biennial’s promise is to provide a snapshot of this time—that is what we’re trying to do.

Locks: That said, curating a show like this is a bit like fumbling around in the dark for matches.

You pick up pieces and maybe they spark, or

they fizzle, and it takes a while before you can really get a flame going, before you start to see the shape. I think a sense of uncertainty or not knowing is embodied in some of the works. Park McArthur’s project is an extension of a series she’s been doing with infrastructural signage, where she omits the text so there’s basically just solid color, just background. For the Biennial, she’s creating signage for points of historical interest—think of those brown roadside signs you see.

There’s something interesting about this notion of way finding without text, without a directive, without content, and the idea of a historic moment that we can mark but it’s blank. It lacks representation because it cannot be represented.

Rothkopf: Throughout the process I got the sense that most of the artists you considered weren’t really working through pop culture or mainstream design and fashion. Chris, you write in your essay about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but not so much about the idea of the Biennial’s artists playing with camp or either espousing or deconstructing the tropes of mass culture or the media. This contrasts with a number of recent large shows like the 2015 New Museum Triennial or the 2016 Berlin Biennale, which was curated by the art collective DIS. Those shows felt very slick and pop, as well as attuned to the promise of fabrication and technology. In your Biennial, I’ve noticed that when the work gets closer to design or a functional aesthetic, it typically takes a hard left turn from high style or, on the other hand, from the look of IKEA. It feels much humbler, very DIY. I’m thinking here of Susan Cianciolo’s emphasis on the handmade and her project for the Whitney’s restaurant, or Jessi Reaves’s oddly disheveled furniture.

Lew: Many of the artists are working in ways that are not ironic but deeply sincere. They are less engaged with corporate aesthetics, and there’s an earnestness that cuts through any notions of camp or style, that gets closer to the functional, as you mention. These artists aren’t just retooling

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the pop that’s out there, they’re actually trying to get at an underlying sensibility that feels deeply urgent. Kamasi Washington, who is himself an emerging pop-culture figure, makes music that addresses social injustice and spirituality. And Puppies Puppies is thinking about pop through an emotionally laden lens and dealing with issues of freedom or the lack thereof. They are not just playing with pop culture in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Rothkopf: I remember you guys coming back from meeting Puppies Puppies. You were so excited and confused that the hairs on the back of your necks were standing up. [laughter] Locks: I guess our visit was the first time that Pups, as we like to call them, actually showed up in person for a studio visit—unmasked. They had done studio visits before, but only when their personhood was concealed behind a costume or behind their partner, who acted as a proxy, walking visitors through an arrangement of artworks.

Anonymity is crucial to Pups. They are interested in the figure of the artist as a kind of work in and of itself. And we talked about the work in a pretty direct way. It was inspiring.

Lew: Unexpected.

Locks: Very unexpected. But aside from pop culture, it strikes me that there has been a renewed interest in a kind of lefty autonomous culture, in the face of mass homogenization. It’s a reaction to a lack of creativity across the board.

That’s where somebody like Frances Stark comes in. She’s one of the more established artists in the show, and she was a touchstone for us. Frances made a suite of large paintings based on enlarged page spreads from Censorship Now!! [2015], a book by the post-punk musician Ian Svenonius, who is an underground cult figure in his own right.

Svenonius makes an argument that it’s not freedom of speech that’s needed to enable the arts to thrive. Rather, we need more censorship of

so-called creative expression—of bland bullshit, mass-produced pop as well as the “free press” and fascist ideology. Frances enlarges this provocation, underlining different sections of the text, as a way of embodying the extreme sentiment, the rage, the ambivalence. So there is a touch of sarcasm or irony in the show despite its prevailing sincerity, and I think it’s compelling to think about this idea of pushing so hard that it goes all the way around— Lew: To the extreme.

Locks: Right. So we wanted to ask, where does autonomous culture exist these days, if we can agree it does still exist, and how does it operate?

Lew: It’s generally small in scale and rooted in a personal exchange. I’m reminded also of Asad Raza and The Home Show [2015] he presented in his modest one-bedroom in SoHo. Asad invited artist friends and family members to give him something for the intimate context of his home.

Locks: This idea of hosting extends to his project for the Biennial, which considers the social relationships that can emerge when we treat each other as hosts and guests versus other categories that are less hospitable, less generous. When you bring this to the space and scale of the museum, of course, a different dynamic is created.

Lew: And keep in mind there’s the direct opposite of hosting in Jordan Wolfson’s new virtual reality piece, which transports the viewer to the scene of a brutal beating. In some instances in the Biennial, the antithesis serves as a productive contrast.

Rothkopf: Well, throughout the show there’s an almost idealistic emphasis on the notion of individual agency . . . I remember you started out with a thematic that had to do with an almost unreconstructed sense of self-expression or

SINCERELY YOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW AND MIA LOCKS Rothkopf, Scott

self-discovery—maybe even self-infatuation. I think at one point I joked that you should call the show “Self-Centered.” [laughter] Chris, you’re even quoting Emerson in your essay. Maybe because I’m just a few years older than the two of you, I struggled with the notion of sincerity at points in our process, and the prevailing lack of irony that you mentioned earlier.

Lew: Sincerity about the self goes all the way back to the founding ideals of the nation. It never went away.

Rothkopf: But I think that it did go away to a certain extent.

Locks: Yes, I mean, postmodernism . . .

Rothkopf: Exactly. Your conception of the self, as discussed in both your essays, is, to a certain extent, a little old-fashioned. It’s not a purely autonomous conception of self, but it isn’t a postmodern model of identity as a matrix of many different texts, or of someone who has constructed a life through social media so they can pretend to be someone they aren’t. If there is a glimmer of hopefulness in your show, it’s that both of you land, in different ways, on the idea of real relationships among real people. This is an idea of an essential self forged in relation to others, whether through intimate relationships or community structures such as schools or churches.

Locks: One thing that seems clear to me, and I hope to anyone who sees the show, is that subjectivity remains an open question—how it forms and operates, how we understand it, how it shapes our daily lives. All the energy and the urgency behind the “identity politics” of the ’80s and ’90s never really went away. The language just shifted to find viable terms or stakes in the age of social media.

Lew: Today museums can actually facilitate

nuanced and complicated conversations around things like identity.

Locks: Artists are, of course, very sensitive to the questions that should be asked.

Lew: And in our research process, we spoke to many artists about not just trying to make it alone, as an individual “brand,” but instead thinking in terms of the communal and collaborative endeavor, about not being motivated by career as much as oriented towards the things a community needs.

Rothkopf: I wonder if this comes from a larger sense of political disillusionment among a younger generation of artists. Perhaps it’s because we’ve had eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, yet the conversation around race is more contested than ever. And we had an opportunity in the wreckage of the financial crisis to reform our banking structures and tax codes, and that didn’t really happen either. And then we elected Trump. Maybe all this has given artists a sense that the broader political conversation has failed, so they should focus on a local community, a group of friends. They’re targeting their agency at a level of change that’s more contained, looking beyond their studios but not at the globe.

Locks: It’s not some huge claim of “I am going to save the world” or “Art can save the world.” I think our generation, and those coming up behind us, feels a certain modesty or humility about what art can do. Artists are starting the conversation with, “Okay, what do I have around me? What are my immediate surroundings and what are their possibilities? How can we build out from here?”

Lew: In part this is in response to how art is being used as a financial asset—how it’s shipped around the world and traded. This is not a dominant theme in the show, but KAYA, GCC, John Divola, and Oto Gillen all draw from the tangled web of aspiration, art, and finance.

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Locks: As artists become increasingly aware of how their work does or might function in this process of financialization, they are thinking seriously about repositioning themselves in relation to it. At the very least, they want to slow it down.

Lew: To frustrate it.

Locks: Take Cameron Rowland, whose proposal for the Biennial is to ask the Whitney to facilitate a financial investment in what is known as a social impact bond. Or Irena Haiduk’s project, which invites visitors to buy shares in a blockchain that will purchase land in the former Yugoslavia. So the economic conditions and possibilities are paramount from the outset in both Rowland’s and Haiduk’s works; they are central to the very idea of each project.

find there is a difficulty, a particular challenge that comes with a project like this. You have this fancy new building, everybody knows how expensive and amazing the space is, and you want to share the wealth. A lot of unpaid artistic labor goes into a process like this, so what can be done? And while this honorarium isn’t going to change anyone’s life, we wanted to allocate something for the artists.

This is a conversation that is happening in the art world—groups like W.A.G.E. [Working Artists and the Greater Economy] are addressing this—it goes way beyond the Biennial. For artists, it’s not just about getting more money. It’s also about acknowledging the inequity in our field. Occupy Museums raises this issue in their Debtfair project, reminding us that the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is very much a reality in the art world.

Rothkopf: So you see this as a first step?

Lew: There’s also Casey Gollan and Victoria Sobel’s collaborative work stemming from their involvement with Free Cooper Union, a group of students who protested the school’s instatement of tuition. Cooper had been free for over 150 years but recently started charging tuition due to poor financial management. Casey and Victoria’s text pieces are infused with the emotions people experience under the weight of capitalist forces.

Locks: Maya Stovall has established her own home in a former financial institution—she actually lives in an old bank on the east side of Detroit.

When we visited her studio, we literally gathered around a teller’s desk as she showed us videos of her performances.

Rothkopf: Speaking of real financial exigencies, you two have proposed that, for the first time, all of the artists in the Biennial are compensated for their participation.

Locks: Yes, it’s a symbolic acknowledgment. I can’t speak for Chris, and I am in a slightly different position as a consultant to the Whitney, but I

Locks: Absolutely. It’s complicated, and there’s no blanket solution that can be applied to every show or every organization. But the wealth gap has become such a prominent issue in the art world, and it felt very much part and parcel of the conversations we were having with artists for our show. This is really about putting your money where your mouth is, about taking action and doing what you can with what you have.

Lew: We want to acknowledge artists as people, as humans—to not just treat an artist as an abstraction, saying, “We want your work, but we’re not going to deal with you as a person.” We want to acknowledge the person across the table.

Rothkopf: We should also recognize the diversity of the artists in the show. It seems there is a greater proportion of artists of color than have ever been in the Biennial. Was this a specific goal, or did it happen organically?

Lew: We were actively thinking about diversity from the very beginning. If you look at the

SINCERELY YOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW AND MIA LOCKS Rothkopf, Scott

dominant systems of the art world, they’re still strongly biased in favor of white men. That’s who you are predominantly seeing in solo exhibitions here in New York, especially in Chelsea. And all institutions, big or small, participate in that. Mia and I, when we were doing our research, were mindful of this problem and actively sought to meet a range of artists.

Locks: Thankfully, we’re seeing more and more public conversations about race and structural asymmetries. These issues have been taken up by Black Lives Matter in very significant ways. It’s not always been the case in American history, or art history for that matter, that we’ve talked about these conditions in a direct way. This is happening right now, and it feels necessary to declare this as a moment—to think not just about race but about systemic racism, and how the various power structures that are in place are enmeshed.

And I would add that a pet peeve of mine is when people assume that artists of color or women artists or those whose identities are more marked would be the only ones to address these issues.

In our show, questions of inequity and asymmetry are driven by artists thinking across lines, developing ideas about allyship and coalition politics that go beyond the limited frameworks of the past.

Lew: That’s something that is brought up in Aily Nash’s roundtable in this catalogue—that these responsibilities fall on everyone’s shoulders.

Locks: We all theoretically believe that there should be more equity or there should be more diversity in the field, but it all comes down to enacting change whenever you have an opportunity. There’s no time like now.

Rothkopf: In addition to the political thrust we’ve been discussing, you’ve included artists who are playing with ambiguous narratives or working more abstractly. Some are creating phenomenological puzzles with glass and mirrors, or quiet

moments of contemplation, or even, dare I say, hits of chromatic exuberance. Are these inclusions meant to offer a pointed alternative to, or respite from, the show’s charged topicality?

Lew: Definitely. Mia and I had a lot of conversations about how we didn’t want the Biennial to be heavy-handed and didactic. We wanted to modulate the rhythm and pacing of the show.

There are moments that, for me, provide remarkable pauses, such as Ulrike Müller’s meditative engagement with the space of the Goergen Gallery, or Larry Bell’s red glass cubes on the terrace. And Carrie Moyer’s abstract paintings carry that punchy, energetic color you refer to.

Rothkopf: I’m glad you mentioned Larry’s installation on the terrace, since having so much outdoor space is one of the many features of our building downtown. To what extent did the new architecture and neighborhood, or the sense of occasion, inform your thinking and the artists’ approaches?

Lew: It’s an exciting thing that we have this long tradition of the Biennial, but this new building offers something of a clean slate. We’re more than a year into the programming here. Our invitation to artists to come and think about the building has resulted in Ajay Kurian’s use of the grand staircase to comment on upward mobility, Zarouhie Abdalian’s outdoor sound installation that speaks to visitors and the city, and Samara Golden’s and Raúl de Nieves’s works that incorporate the natural light and views afforded by the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Locks: This has been an opportunity to let the artists guide us in what the possibilities are for the new building.

Lew: But in terms of history, the curatorial staff at the Museum has been an incredible resource.

It’s such a long-standing team, with curators who have organized Biennials over the last three

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decades. When the 2012 curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders recounted pitching an empty floor dedicated to performance to the Whitney’s Director Adam Weinberg, we knew anything was possible.

Rothkopf: I love this sense of possibility. It’s part of the Whitney’s DNA and something we cherish.

We’re starting over, but the history remains—not just as a list of past exhibitions but in the artists and curators who made them. We’re adding a new branch to our family tree.